Monthly Archives: December 2006

Paradoxes The collapse of Tower Records was, as much as anything, a failure of relevance. The new generation, which in the past would have become the next record-buying public and the next, now download the infinite riches of the market onto their iPods. The hi-fi crowd of my youth, with their 6L6s in push-pull and […]

Words’ Worth “Music is never pure,” wrote Luciano Berio of his Circles, “it is attitude; it is theater.” Berio’s great vocal adventure ended the 1961-62 season of Monday Evening Concerts, to a capacity crowd. It began the 2006-07 season last week, again with a turn-away box office. Much has happened in between; we’ll get to […]

Straight to the Kisser The Sixth Symphony of Antonin Dvorák disarms all protest. It snuggles into your awareness with a warm-hearted, syncopated throb, eases onto your lap and delivers an irresistible wet kiss. No other music in my acquaintance, large-scale or small, comes at you quite this way, although the previous symphony in the Dvorák […]

Sex Triumphant . . . Beyond the memories – pleasant, as far as they go – of The Coronation of Poppea with the Emperor Nero cruising his realm in a Ferrari bearing ROMA-1 license plates, and far beyond the abject journalistic misrepresentation of the pristine work in last week’s hometown press, two aspects of this […]